The Night Eternal

October 3, 2011
Del Toro and Hogan’s horror thriller trilogy got off to a rousing start with 2009’s The Strain, but this final volume continues the decline already evident in 2010’s The Fall. Instead of building on the coauthors’ clever modern variations on the classic Dracula motif (e.g., the use of nuclear winter to make life easier for the sun-shunning undead), the conclusion is strictly by the numbers as the various New York City–based protagonists, saddled with personal issues on top of an almost hopeless struggle to survive, try to find a way to rid Earth of the vampiric plague that has overwhelmed it in just a few short years. Readers will miss the series’ Van Helsing, Holocaust survivor Abraham Setrakian, killed off in the second installment, since the surviving vampire hunters aren’t nearly as interesting. Still, the power and innovations of the kickoff book should lead del Toro fans to hope he’ll take another crack at a scary novel.